By no conventional means
by NeueHaasGrotesk
Summary: "Do I really smell so offensive to you?" Kuroba asks. Hakuba only presses the handkerchief harder to his nose, and concentrates on breathing through his mouth. Kuroba cannot be further from the truth. Omegaverse K/S/H


A.N: Now I have brought my filth over into the DCMK fandom and I should be sorry, but I'm not sorry. You can also find me as 5160763 on tumblr. Unbetaed.

* * *

He smells blood, and gunpowder, and anger before he smells _omega_ , and the faintest trace of fear. There's no one on the roof now, but he knows KID is folded up out of sight in the recess beneath the jutting edge of the roof, neatly tucked in except for the corner of his cape, white fabric flapping in the wind.

Hakuba leans as far over the edge as he dares to, all while trying to ignore the long drop down to unforgiving concrete below (trying not to think about how easily an injured KID may slip and plummet down where he couldn't catch him), and hisses quietly. Beneath him, there is a flicker of movement, then a pale face peers warily back at him.

"Gone," Hakuba says. "The coast is clear."

The face disappears, and then KID is pulling himself back up to the roof with bare hands and a fluid grace that Hakuba can only hope to emulate possibly in his dreams. He presses a hand to his back to steady him when KID sways on his feet, the thief leaning back into his support for a brief moment, warm wool against his palm before he straightens and pulls away, cold wind occupying the space he's left. There's blood down the front of his suit - not all of them his - and KID does a quick change as he watches, soiled white bundled up and disappearing into a backpack.

"Can you drive?"

He's always had baaya to chauffeur him around, and in the choked up traffic conditions of London, he's never had the need to get a license, not when he can get around by far easier with a bicycle.

Kuroba shows him an empty palm, clenches it into a fist, and then there is what looks to be an tranq dart lying on his open palm. The vial is empty. Hakuba feels his blood freeze at the implication as Kuroba vanishes the syringe, the boy smiling wanly back in face of his own horror.

"Nothing like living dangerously," Kuroba says with a casualness Hakuba does not feel.

Kuroba hotwires a motorbike for the both of them, Hakuba squeezing onto the back with him, arms gingerly wrapped around the thief's chest, mindful of the wound on his side. They roar down the mostly empty streets of Tokyo (no helmet, drugged driving, violation of traffic speed limits - Hakuba wonders if wherever Kuroba's gotten his license will give him one too), Kuroba's knuckles white on the handlebars and muscles coiled tight, chest rising and falling by far too evenly for him to have been breathing naturally. Hakuba presses his nose close to where the line of his shirt collar is, and doesn't say a thing when he jumps a few red lights in succession.

"Where are we going?"

They take a sharp turn around a corner light, Hakuba's heart lurching when it feels as though their wheels will go out from beneath them, but Kuroba rights them quickly, although not quickly enough that Hakuba misses the slight wobble to their vehicle.

"Somewhere safe," Kuroba says, about when Hakuba thinks that Kuroba's never heard him. "Stop that. I'm ticklish."

He focuses on the bead of sweat trickling down the back of Kuroba's neck, and sheepishly press his palms obediently flat against Kuroba's ribcage, stopping the petting motion he's been doing with his thumbs against the other's side, more to soothe himself than anyone else. "Sorry."

Kuroba snorts, and the city passes by in a blur of light.

::

'Somewhere safe' turns out to be an empty apartment, tight and cramped and claustrophobic when Kuroba throws on the light.

Hakuba lingers uncomfortably by the door as Kuroba sheds his shirt the way a snake would its skin, hand pressed tight over his nose and mouth as the scent of omega fills up the room. No window. His gaze snaps back to Kuroba when the boy sets out a medical kit and a thick volume before him, fingers pressed to the edges of his wound (jagged gash down the side, not deep enough to be a problem, scarring unavoidable).

"Want to give me a hand?" Kuroba quirks an eyebrow at him as he misses the needle for the fourth time in a row. "Or are you squeamish?"

Hakuba unfolds himself from the stiff posture he's taken up against the wall, and steps forward to take the needle and thread from Kuroba's shaking hands. Kuroba nudges the book at him, and he glances down at the medical text lying open on stitches and sutures, the boy's hand hot against his thigh.

"Would have done it myself if I could," Kuroba murmurs quietly, and Hakuba can see that his pupils are blown wide. "Sorry."

The sensation of pulling needle and thread through blood and flesh is disturbing, to say the least. Hakuba grits his teeth through all of it, Kuroba barely making a sound beneath his hands, skin washed pale by the tube lights on the ceiling as he breathes in, and out, and Hakuba snips off the thread at the end of it.

He washes his hands in the small sink in the corner, Kuroba turning his head to watch him as he dries his hands on his own pants, settles back against the wall to keep watch. His hands smell like lilies, from the liquid soap sitting on the sink, and he focuses on that scent.

"You don't have to stay," Kuroba tells the ceiling, a slight slurring to his words that only manages to tell Hakuba otherwise. "I must smell terrible to you."

Lilies. Slow breaths, in, and out. In. Out.

"It's mostly the blood that's offensive," he says.

::

He doesn't see Kuroba for a week, after he's left him in the care of Kudou and the little blonde chemist who is never happy to see either of them. He isn't happy to see her either, considering the circumstances under which they always meet, but he never voices that opinion to anyone aloud.

His seat is empty for a week, and then it isn't, Kuroba returning to cause the signature mayhem that follows him wherever he goes. He sets the chemistry labs on fire, as if in celebration, and Hakuba asks for the day off from school, putting blame on stress and a persistent headache.

He's silent on the ride home from school, excusing himself to bed and allowing baaya to express her concern and worry for him in the form of an endless supply of tea and lemon slices, and the cream cheese chicken thing that she makes each time he is feeling beneath the weather or just being down in general (by now, nothing gets past her at all, and he thinks the lack of a bubble pack of paracetamol is rather telling). He lies in bed, pretends to read, and does absolutely nothing at all. He is a pathetic enough picture that baaya knocks on his door to inform him that she has called him in sick for tomorrow, and that he should get all the rest that he needs.

Whatever would he do without her, he wonders, and dissolves an extra spoon of sugar into his tea just for the sweetness.

::

"He shot at me, once," Kuroba says, kicking back onto the hindlegs of his chair, and cramming a handful of corn chips into his mouth at once. "It was exhilarating."

Exhilarating wouldn't be the word that Hakuba would use when someone was shooting at you, but it was Kuroba's story, and far be it for him to tell Kuroba what it is that normal people feel when there's a gun pointed at someone. Instead, he stares harder into the bright screen of his computer and nods along to his words. At this point, he doesn't think that Kuroba cares whether he's listening or not.

As Kuroba chatters away, Hakuba carefully swallows the things that he wants to say that he shouldn't ever say (entertains the idea that he just might be a masochist after all) and thinks back to the heists, to how easily the KID killer has always managed to find KID, to the chase that KID leads him on each time they meet that he never extends to Hakuba (appropriate, considering now he knows what Kuroba is, and what Kudou is, and what _he_ is).

Still, Kuroba has trusted in him enough (a portrait of a deceased father, a flock of white doves and jewels that are never Pandora) and Hakuba knows better than to betray that trust (not that he can ever hope to have the same kind of closeness that Kudou has with Kuroba, despite the fact that he was _first_ ).

He's seen the bonding mark on Kudou's neck, when the other detective had dropped by once because Kuroba wouldn't stop texting him for ice cream (and recon, but, technicalities).

(Nevermind that Kuroba is an omega, or that Kudou is an alpha because since when has conventions ever applied to Kuroba?)

"...and you've put handcuffs on me, too, so that makes everyone even. I feel so loved - you're not even listening, are you?"

Kuroba rolls into his bed as a childish form of revenge, and Hakuba sighs through his nose, drawing on the reservoir of patience that he has (Kuroba wouldn't know the half of it, and if he has his way, will never find out at all).

(His sheets smell of the bland, unremarkable kind of beta that Kuroba disguises himself as every day, and when Hakuba sleeps, he dreams of doves and a classroom and KID. There's a pair of black rimmed spectacles folded on his desk, and KID only grins, and grins, and grins.)

He doesn't change the sheets until the smell has faded completely.

::

He finds out what is in the vial that hit KID when he's flat on the floor, and Spider has a hand fisted in his hair. It's hot, too hot, and he is startled when he whimpers in response to Spider's inappropriate touch down his neck and chest. It clearly startles Spider as well, but being the undrugged individual out of the two, he recovers more quickly.

There's a loud clatter, some shouting, scuffling noises but Hakuba can barely focus past his need that's boiling under his skin, desire to be touched overriding all other rational thought. There's a lot of white in front of him, and he mewls quietly when gloved fingers cup his cheek.

"Shit, he's going into heat," someone says above him.

(Impossible, he wants to say, because he's always been a beta, but his tongue is thick and heavy in his mouth, and his head spins.)

He loses track of time for a bit, but when his mind is slightly clearer, he is lying on a bed (not his own, wonders whose), Kuroba on one side of him and Kudou on the other. Kudou is a scalding line of heat against his bare legs and back, and Kuroba only smiles brightly at him when he notices that he is coherent, leaning in to nose at his neck, deliberately sniffing.

"I always thought that you smell a little odd for a beta," Kuroba whispers quietly into his ear, and the drug must still be in his system, because he shudders, and whines when a hand runs over his hip and down his thigh.

(Impossible.)

Kuroba's never put much stock into what's possible and what isn't.

(But whatever impossible remains, must be the truth.)

::

As far as first heats go, he could have had worse. He sits in Kuroba's bed, weak as a kitten as Kuroba plies food on him (the boy thinks his stomach is endless, like his own), and tries to come to terms with his own biology.

When he had reached puberty and had failed to present as either an alpha or an omega, he had been content with mediocrity. Life had seen fit to spare him the frankly uncomfortable hormonal urges and the whole bit about struggling against one's biological nature to get anywhere in life without having one's biological representation walking a mile ahead before anyone saw past of what society believed you were simply because your genes were coded a certain way.

He had never stopped to think about why he was so affected by Kuroba's scent the day he found out he was an omega (decided that Kuroba was a special case), never questioned the odd sensation that came over him when Kudou was near without a masking agent on his skin (chalked it up to jealousy).

("Do I really smell that offensive to you?" Kuroba had asked when he had caught onto his always standing by the window when they're both in the same room, and he couldn't be further from the truth.)

He'd been content with bland and boring and average. Next to the bed, Kudou is texting away furiously, an inscrutable expression on his face and Hakuba pries Kuroba's hands from his waist.

He doesn't want to be caught in between them (doesn't want to be compared).

"Silly," Kuroba had laughed. "He's not my alpha. He's my detective."

The hands return, insistent, and though he's on the tail end of his heat, he finds himself yearning for the contact, Kudou's gaze flicking upwards away from his phone with a faint glimmer of approval. Kuroba pulls him close, a hand on the back of his neck and Hakuba buries his nose against the junction of Kuroba's neck and shoulder, inhaling.

"He's not my omega, either," Kudou offers.

Too little of either and Hakuba's stuck on the threshold and caught in between. The good news is that he won't ever have another full blown heat, unless someone darts him again (unlikely) because his body is simply not equipped.

Blunt teeth scrape over his pulse, and then Kuroba bites down lightly, possessively. Not hard enough to leave a mark (but enough to plant the seed of an idea) before he noses against Hakuba's ear, affectionate.

"I'll leave it to you," he says.

::

"He was being _sweet_ ," Kudou says, eventually, after a week of Hakuba's wearing a scarf around when it's still far too early in autumn for scarves. "He bit me at a heist with little to no warning."

"Have you checked for rabies?" Hakuba tuts, and is entirely unsurprised when his ice cream cone disappears from his hand.

(He doesn't know what it will make them to be when it's all over, when he's no longer their thief, but Kuroba will always find a way to defy expectations.

And that's alright.)


End file.
